Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era [Paperback]

Merle Goldman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674830083 | ISBN-13: 978-0674830080 | Publication Date: March 19, 1995

The West's leading authority on the role of intellectuals in contemporary China presents a percipient account of the efforts at political reform in the Deng Xiaoping era. Merle Goldman describes a group of highly placed intellectuals who, with the patronage of Deng Xiaoping's designated successors Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang, attempted to reshape both China's Marxist-Leninist ideology and its political system.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Dissident intellectuals played a key role in the demise of European communism. Can Chinese intellectuals play a similar role in a democratic transformation of China after the death of Deng Xiaoping? In this important study, Goldman, our leading chronicler of Chinese literary and intellectual politics, meticulously traces the political evolution during the 1980s of the small group of high-profile intellectuals she somewhat misleadingly calls the "democratic elite." By spring 1989, many of them had abandoned their faith in the power of the Communist party to transform itself and had moved toward the politics of democratic opposition. But Goldman's focus on intellectuals is only one dimension of the politics of democratic transition in China, where vast socioeconomic changes have badly eroded Communist party rule. For all academic libraries. --Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

[A] definitive study of China's dissidents...[Goldman] is the foremost Western expert on China's intellectual dissidents--especially writers--since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949...Whenever one seeks an explanation, Goldman furnishes it.
--Jonathan Mirsky (New York Times Book Review )

Goldman selects about three dozen figures for careful study...Some of the subjects...appear in one of [her] two earlier books (Literary Dissent in Communist China and China's Intellectuals). The three books are similar in style, chronologically consecutive, and together make a comprehensive and shrewdly analytical history of the battles that have taken place over dissident thought in Communist China.
--Perry Link (New York Review of Books )

The title of Goldman's new volume is misleading: the book is not simply a recounting of political reform (or its lack) in post-Mao China, but a fascinating account of how China's intellectuals sought to produce such reform in a sometimes favorable, but often hostile, environment. We learn an enormous amount from this book about who the important intellectual actors are in post-Mao China as well as about their views, activities, and relationship to elites and how each of these changed during the course of the era. Goldman's interesting conclusion is that China's intellectuals largely failed in their efforts to bring about political reform through the traditional means of appealing to elite sponsors and acting as the voice of the masses. (Journal of Interdisciplinary History )

Goldman's book is a valuable addition to a growing literature which seeks to understand the changing nature of Chinese politics in the wake of the economic reform.
--Zhimin Lin (Review of Politics )

Until now, no work has adequately probed the intellectual climate of China's decade of reform ending in the Tiananmen drama of May-June 1989. With sensitivity to both the Confucian and Maoist past, Goldman, in a gripping narrative, reviews the lives and activities of a host of intellectual gadflies. (Virginia Quarterly Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 19, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674830083
• ISBN-13: 978-0674830080
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #312,485 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book about the topic I know, March 31, 2000

By 

Anke Mewis - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Hardcover)

This book contains a lot of information about not only the political events but especially about the discussions among the intellectuals who are active in democracy-related topics, about emerging groups and their opinions and actions with a focus on important persons and presents their history, statements, activities and conflicts with administration and government. It provides a very dense description and the quality is comparable with the book "China. A New History" which she published as a successor of John K. Fairbank. But this one her goes - of course - much more into detail.